SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20240110-34FE2-2147342862. Severity: No Incident, No Injury. Product: Kidde Model P4010DCS-W (Kidde Smoke Alarm / wireless interconnected. Model P4010DCS-W 10 Year Worry-Free Sealed Battery Smoke Detector with Intelligent and Wire-Free Voice Interconnect (2-Pack)). Incident: We bought 6 of these alarms in July 2023 in 5 months have had 5 false alarms. It is a dangerous alarm because everyone has started to assume it is a false alarm when they go off. Our neighbors checked on use the first two times but now they assume it is false. Have been woken up and had to come home from work. They go off when no one is cooking and/or is home. I have tried all the suggestions for placement and dust regularly and am still having issues. We have the correct placement for all alarms. I do like the way when one alarm goes off the others go off which is nice downstairs and our ADU. Since we get so many false alarms it has become unsafe. The first time I called customer service I was on hold for 30 mins and it took 1 hour to get issue resolved. They can only send a replacement and admit that these alarms have issues with being too sensitive. Products like this are why people disable their fire alarms. Nuisance fire alarms like these present big safety issues because frequent false alarms desensitize occupants. If occupants grow accustomed to hearing an alarm without a fire it seriously slows the response time to the alarm. This creates a dangerous situation in the case of a real emergency that can result in significant risk to life. These alarms should be recalled. They have very bad reviews from customers due to this issue.